Super Bowl Sunday And The ACC - A Fading Tradition

The link is fading, fading, like the intercepted Ham radio connection between son and long-dead father briefly, achingly conversing across decades during a solar storm in the 2000 film “Frequency”.

Sadly, for the third consecutive year a less ethereal connection has been broken between a featured ACC men’s basketball game and the playing of the NFL’s Super Bowl. But there remains an ACC link of sorts. Super Bowl LVII will be played on Feb. 12, Pitt coach Jeff Capel’s XLVIII birthday.

Also, tangential to a sports theme yet still worthy of mention, February 12 is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Born in Kentucky in 1809, the 6-4 president never played basketball, which was not invented during his lifetime. When he was murdered by John Booth, the worst of sore losers, Lincoln was younger than 5 current ACC coaches.

Capel is among four ACC men’s head basketball coaches younger than the Super Bowl, which debuted a half-century ago. A front runner for ACC Coach of the Year along with Clemson’s Brad Brownell, Capel was born in North Carolina in 1975, the first year Chuck Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl. BC’s Earl Grant entered this world in 1976, Georgia Tech’s Josh Pastner in 1977. Duke’s Jon Scheyer, the league’s youngest head coach, didn’t arrive on the scene until 1987.

Pitt’s Capel twice played for Duke on Super Sundays, splitting with Maryland as an upperclassman in 1996 and 1997. NFC teams followed with wins both times.

This year’s Super Bowl will be played in Glendale, Arizona, at State Farm Stadium, formerly University of Phoenix Stadium and home of the Fiesta Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs last won a Super Bowl in 2020, their second title, defeating San Francisco the same day the ACC’s Pitt Panthers topped the Miami Hurricanes. Philadelphia, the other 2023 contestant, won in 2018, defeating New England. On a happier note for regional sensibilities, Boston College topped Georgia Tech in overtime in ACC action in ‘18.

Now that the NFL season has been extended to 17 games, and the Super Bowl isn’t played until mid-February, TV has adjusted its college basketball schedule. Last season was the first since 1991 that the year’s initial Duke-North Carolina clash — an unofficial, dependable ratings winner and national season tipoff — was broadcast prior to the Super Bowl rather than afterward. This year is the second early February blue-on-blue matchup.

Meanwhile the ACC has chosen to forgo its once-prominent Super Bowl tie, whose historic nature received scant attention anyway from the conference, its TV water-carriers, other media, and sponsors. Just another example of ACC traditions fading fast, along with the demise of the round-robin and the move of league headquarters to Charlotte from Greensboro. The postseason ACC Tournament continues but in an elongated, five-day version, this year returning to Greensboro for the 29^th time.

This is the seventh Super Bowl not preceded by an ACC game, including the past three.

The ACC’s bond with the Super Bowl dates to January 1973. That year two great ACC teams met first: undefeated and second-ranked NC State led by David Thompson and Tom Burleson, which edged a No. 3 Maryland team spearheaded by Tom McMillen, John Lucas and Len Elmore, 87-85. Thompson, the ACC’s greatest player to date, tipped in a miss at the buzzer to seal the outcome in a rare national college telecast in that pre-dunk, pre-cable era.

When contemporary college players artfully set up big men for lob-dunks, recall the still-electrifying move started with the 6-4 Thompson, the three-time ACC player of the year (1973-75), soaring for a feed by guard Monte Towe.

Given the formidable stature of the opponent, the Wolfpack’s win at Maryland also marked a crucial step in maintaining the second and last unblemished season record in conference history. On probation in 1972-73, NC State was banned from amplifying its 27-0 mark in postseason play. Previously UNC turned in a 32-0 record in winning the 1957 NCAA championship.

The ‘73 ACC contest brimmed with drama, in sharp contrast to the lackluster 14-7 Super Bowl VII that followed. The Miami Dolphins won handily despite a deceptive 14-7 final score, concluding the only undefeated NFL season (17-0) since the 1967 advent of the Game Of Multimillion Dollar Commercials.

Washington, now the Commanders (Commies?), remains among 8 competitors that failed to score in double digits in the first LIV Super Bowls.

Back on the collegiate side NC State, at 10-5, remains the most successful and prolific ACC team playing in tandem with the Largest Halftime Show on Earth. That despite not appearing as a Super accouterment since 2008.

BC’s 2018 inclusion in the day’s warmup game reduced to four the number of former Big East teams that have yet to participate as ACC members in Super Festivities (Louisville, Notre Dame, Syracuse, and Virginia Tech). Louisville played on the golden day in 1989 as a Metro Conference member.

The Cards, with senior captains Pervis Ellison and Kenny Payne, now the Cardinals’ first-year coach, played in concert with the ’89 Super Bowl and beat UNLV by 18. Scheyer and the Blue Devils lost to FSU by a point in 2007 prior to the Super Bowl, then beat Virginia by 25 in 2009.

NC State participated in five of the ACC’s Super Hors d’Oeuvre encounters. The Wolfpack won in ’73 and ’93, lost in 1977, 1980 and 1987.